Alecky Blythe describes how she gathered material for her latest
verbatim play, Little Revolution, about the London riots, and why she hopes
it'll be a very lively show indeed

Alecky Blythe is one of the pioneers of “verbatim” theatre – documentary drama constructed from recorded interviews. Come Out Eli was about a siege in Hackney in 2002, andLondon Road, a musical piece about a community healing itself after the Ipswich murders of 2006, was a hit for the National Theatre.

Her new play, Little Revolution, looks at how an area in London was affected by the riots and looting of 2011. Here she explains how she created it:

I’ve always got an eye out for things that happen in the news. When I saw that the riots started to kick off in Tottenham, I went up there as soon as I could over the weekend. I’d missed the rioting, but heard it was spreading to Brixton, so I headed south, thinking I would do interviews there. But the Tubes were closed, so I got off the Underground at Stockwell and found a message from my mum on my phone saying, “Darling, I hope you’re all right, I’ve just seen on the news that the riots are spreading to Hackney,” which is where I live, so I changed direction again and headed back home to see on the news where exactly they were happening.

I probably procrastinated a bit: “Should I go? It does look a bit hairy.” When gathering material for a play, I have to think very carefully whether I want to get myself into a particular situation, but I couldn’t help myself.

I saw bins overturned and buses smashed up. It turned out the police had kettled the main rioters into a road that runs through the Pembury estate. It was around six o’clock and I found a spot where I felt that I could watch it safely but also get quite close to the action.

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There was just one shop on the street that was being looted, a convenience store, and there was a moment when things nearly turned nasty for me. I was taking pictures on the street and there was a burning car and I thought, “Maybe if am ever going to make a play of this, it would be handy to get some shots for the designer,” but my phone was playing up. I remember thinking, “Come on phone, hurry up.” And eventually it worked.

I was trying to take a photo of the scene in general, not focusing on anyone in particular, but of course there were people running about all over the place and I ended up accidentally taking a flash photo of a guy coming out of the shop carrying a crate of beer, and he came all the way up to me, him and his mate all hooded up, and said, “Who are you? Who’re you working for?” and asked to see the picture on my phone.

Anyway, as it turned out, the camera had just taken him from the neck down as he’d walked in to the shot and he was all right about it and said, “OK,” and off he went! At which point I said to myself, “I think I’m going to go now.”

The focus of the play became the shop I saw being looted, which belonged to a man called Siva, a Tamil refugee. It sits on Clarence Road, which has, on one side, a beautiful square of old town houses easily worth the best part of a million pounds, and, on the other, the Pembury estate, which is much less affluent, with a more mixed community. The shop serves people from both sides of the street, regardless of income bracket.

So the play really looks at how the two sides of the street react to the looting. On the one side there’s Sarah and Tony, who live in the square, work in the media and are instrumental in setting up a website to raise money to reopen Siva’s shop, which, along with other members of the community, they do incredibly successfully. Within 11 days they raise £50,000 through donations, and the shop is reopened. A tea party is also held in the street to try to bring the community back together again.

Blythe is most known for London Road, a musical based on the 2006 Ipswich murders. Photo: Clara Molden

However, for some of the mums on the Pembury estate, a tea party and reopening of the shop do not address the bigger underlying social issues in the area. They decide to set up their own campaign, called Stop Criminalising Hackney Youth, to try to combat what they see as negative stereotyping in the media of black youths in the area.

But there’s also a third tier of characters, the older generation on the estate, who run the tenants’ association and whose viewpoint is far less sympathetic towards the youth, having been on the receiving end of gang crime and violence that they say they’ve seen increase over the years. So, really, the play presents all sides of the argument – and the street.

One thing that emerged from the research was exactly how the gap between rich and poor is growing. There’s now a greater financial apartheid. Areas like Hackney are being overrun with coffee shops selling cappuccinos for £3. I’m aware I’m part of that gentrification – I’ve been living in Hackney for 12 years now – but what the play made clear to me, clearer than before, was what those tensions were and that people were getting really angry about it.

The script of Little Revolution is all created from the real conversations I had with people, and, as in all my previous shows, apart from London Road, I use the technique of “recorded delivery” [in performance, snippets of dialogue are played to the actors through headphones, which they then recite out loud for the audience to hear]. It’s a technique I learnt from Mark Wing-Davey at the Actors Centre in London over a decade ago.

A number of the actors in Little Revolution have used the technique before, but others, such asImogen Stubbs (who plays Sarah) and Ronni Ancona(one of the mums on the estate involved in the Stop Criminalising Hackney Youth campaign) are new to it. I think they’re enjoying it. You can pretty much tell in auditions which actors are open to trying something new.

When I started out, I used to cast against type, so I might have had a white guy playing a black guy or vice versa. I’ve stopped doing that. I think I was slightly in love with the gimmick to start with, but now I prefer to trust the story and that people will come to see it because it’s a good story, not because it’s a quirky technique. For this play we’ve also got 30 participants from Islington and Hackney, who are going to make up a community chorus that has been organised by the projects team at the Almeida.

What do I hope the play will achieve? The title comes from something that Colin, who has the barber shop on Clarence Road, said to me. He described what happened as a “mini-revolution”. Actually, nothing much has changed, so there truly has been little revolution in Hackney. I would like to see some kind of revolution in terms of relations with the police, otherwise it’s not going to take a lot for riots to kick off again.

Also, I hope the play might reach a wider audience than normal at the Almeida, which is traditionally very white and middle-class. The piece has a much broader appeal than that because of the mixed community from different sides of the street it’s representing on stage. I think it might be a very lively show indeed.

Alecky Blythe wastalking to Tim Auld. 'Little Revolution’ is at the Almeida Theatre until October 4 (020 7359 4404; almeida.co.uk)